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Stone Links: The Sources of Ethical Authority

By A.c. Lee April 25, 2012 4:56 pmApril 25, 2012 4:56 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

At the Religion and Ethics section of The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website, two philosophers use the quote, “If there is no God, everything is permitted,” commonly attributed to Dostoevsky, as a touchstone for considering whether there is an ultimate source of ethical authority.

In his essay, Philip Kitcher suggests that, after generations of moral practice, our sustained experiment in living together has taught us that “viewing ethics as a human historical achievement does better at explaining its authority.” And what of those who refuse to buy into the common ethical project, extreme skeptics à la Nietzsche? Unless they offer a serious alternative, says Kitcher, “we can only regard skepticism as a repudiation of any recognizably human form of life.”

Slavoj Zizek begins his essay by pointing out that, though language vaguely similar to the quote appears in “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky “simply never said it.” This almost universal misattribtion reflects an ambiguity that Zizek is keen to explore. He points to Jacques Lacan’s “reversal” of the famous maxim: “If there is no God, then everything is prohibited,” and wonders if this counter-intuitive premise isn’t in fact a better description of contemporary Western society’s “liberal/hedonist behavior.”

A Broken Paradigm? After turning the history and philosophy of science upside down with the publication of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” 50 years ago, Thomas Kuhn spent virtually the rest of his career defending — often in vain — its key ideas. At least, this is the story David Weinberger tells in an article on Kuhn at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Perhaps the most vexing problem Kuhn faced, according to Weinberger, is how to account for scientific progress, when concepts like paradigm shift and incommensurability seem to suggest that “progress” is at best problematic, or worse, impossible. Weinberger attributes much of the trouble to Kuhn’s distaste for a straightforward correspondance theory of truth, and thinks abandoning one concept of truth means “we need another idea of what truth is and how we can ascertain if we’re progressing closer to it.”

Markson’s Marginalia: Not long after he died in 2010, word got out that titles from the personal library of David Markson, author of “Wittgenstein’s Mistress”, had turned up for sale at the New York book store The Strand. Fans of the author made efforts to reconstruct the library, without much success. Now, one “Marksonite” in possession of over 200 of the master’s books has taken to tumblr, posting scans of the marginalia Markson scrawled in books like “The Age of Anxiety” by W. H. Auden and “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy” by William Barrett, opening a window into the mind of an artist whom David Foster Wallace felt had actually managed to dramatize philosophy in the form of narrative prose fiction.

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.